I’m a technology journalist and currently write for websites such as bit-tech.net and magazines such as Custom PC and Computer Active. I’ve been building and modifying PCs for 20 years and writing about them for over six years. I’ve reviewed countless pieces of hardware and peripherals and also have a passion for all things tech - from Microsoft Windows to Apple iOS, PC gaming to iPhone jailbreaking. I’ll be offering guides, tips and insights into current and future trends, PC tweaking, the weird and wonderful world of PC modding and plenty of gadget-orientated articles.

Why Battery Life Should Be The New Smartphone Battleground

Most smartphones need charging every one or two days – but battery technology is also lagging behind other smartphone features

Smartphones are unquestionably one of the most useful devices of the 21st century but they continue to have one critical flaw – battery life. We’ve all been there – you forgot to charge your smartphone and you have 10% battery life left to see you through the day.

You think of ways to charge it, perhaps stopping off at a local coffee shop to hook up to a power adapter, switching the phone off to make an important call later, or maybe you’ve even purchased a portable power pack to charge it on the go.

The trouble is, few if any manufacturers seem to have cottoned on to just how much each of us uses our smartphone. They, and sadly many consumers as well, have been obsessed with size and weight but they forget that smartphones are no longer just things we use lightly for an hour a day.

Many of us play games, check out Facebook or news apps, navigate using a Sat Nav app or GoogleGoogle Maps, download, read and reply to emails and all manner of other things in addition to make cellular calls and send text messages. We’ll do these things on the train, at work, while we’re in the bath tub and even in bed.

Sadly, while the processing power and features of modern smartphones is more than up to the task, especially with 4G data speeds coming on tap in many different countries, their batteries simply aren’t. In fact they’re still using comparatively old technology that pre-dates the smartphone itself. There are two main issues with all current smartphone batteries. They take a long time to charge and they lack capacity.

The former might seem like an odd issue to raise but imagine if you could charge your smartphones to 80 or 90% in less than five minutes? Hook it up while you’re having breakfast and by the time you’re ready to leave for school or work, it’s nearly fully charged. This would drastically improve the situation but as is stands, even connecting your smartphone to a mains socket as opposed to your laptop’s USB port, it’s still likely to take a at least an hour to fully charge a smartphone from flat.

Capacity is the real crux of the issue, though, and it’s what makes smartphone battery cases so popular. These are cases with integrated batteries that you can switch on to charge your phone, basically doubling its battery life. Heavy users likely find the need to charge their phones once a day – a battery case can extend this to two days. But what if a single charge could last for a week of heavy use? Does charging your phone on Sunday night and even with a week of heavy use, not having to charge it till the weekend sound good?

Powerpack cases with built-in batteries can give you portable power on the go, but even the best ones only double your phone’s battery life.

I doubt anyone would answer no to that question but for me, battery life is becoming increasingly irritating. In fact, my next smartphone purchase will likely put battery life near or at the top of my list of priorities.

After all, there are only so many new features you can add to smartphones, which already offer fast cellular and WiFi speeds, GPS, Blutooth, Near Field Communication, touch screens, high resolution cameras with flash and curved screens to name a few, and you can’t use any of these with a flat battery.

The latest mobile sales figures show that plenty of people are willing to jump ship from Android to IOS and vice versa and I for one would be the first to do so if one manufacturer introduced a phone with a significantly improved battery life. I’d even go as far as saying I’d accept a modest increase in thickness and weight if only to get better battery life. You can also replace your smartphone’s battery – even on an iPhone as I wrote about in a previous article.

Graphene can potentially help make batteries last longer and be flexible too. Image courtesy of the Royal Society of Chemistry

Thankfully there is some hope on the horizon too. Several manufacturers have been looking into ways of getting smartphones themselves to generate power, either through small solar cells or movement. There’s also new battery technologies that make use of revolutionary materials such as graphene, that have the potential to increase the power density of current battery sizes many-fold.

One thing is for certain though. Whichever manufacturer comes up with the breakthrough first is going to sell smartphones by the bucketload and will likely make its shareholders very happy indeed.

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Why do you think the Galaxy Note 3 is selling so well? It’s not just the big 1080p screen, quadcore CPU, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and the fact it’s made by Samsung instead of Apple, it’s the fast charging battery with a reasonable amount of power that doesn’t drain very fast during use!

Anthony great article and we agree, a good analysis and this is one of the bottlenecks in the user experience of phone ownership that is troublesome for users, and so we also agree that anyone that breakdown and resolve the batter life issue, however they do it will make buckets of cash

See the Motorola Droid Razr MAXX HD. Battery life is measured in DAYS. As in: “oops, I forgot to charge last night, oh well, I’ll get through today”. As in easily able to get through a day on the road, watching movies on the plane COAST TO COAST while still having enough life at the end to advise the taxi or drive the rental to the hotel when you land.

Yes, I still charge nightly, because it’s easy. But having lived with several other smart phones, I will never, ever again accept a phone with a battery life that can’t be easily and readily measured in 2+ days. Speed is irrelevant: most any recent phone can do what I need, fast enough that I don’t care. Screens are also irrelevant: I have not been want for a bigger/brighter/whatever screen since my (now ancient) Moto Droid 2. Keyboards are irrelevant once I realized what a good combination an on screen keyboard + spell checking actually is.

Battery life is what makes a phone, especially a phone while on the road, feel like a friend rather than an opponent that must be vanquished!

What’s strange is that the Razr Maxx (and similarly the Moto X) has class-leading battery life, but lousy sales. I agree with the author that this is an important frontier in smartphones. But so far, no one who is doing anything about it is getting rewarded.

I own a Maxx and love it for the battery life, but I noticed that when it was released, the battery life was usually mentioned only briefly, and towards the end of the ad. Once we see a marketing campaign that truly puts the battery life front and center, I think we’ll see a difference in sales.

For example, show someone who gets a call to meet for lunch, but her phone dies before she can get the details because she played too much Angry Birds that morning. Now show someone at dinner who has been using her phone all day, and then gets a call from her friends to meet downtown for a concert. She looks at her phone: still at 50%! Happy music plays as she runs out, smiling, to grab a cab. As a Maxx owner I always see people in the former scenario and think how frustrating it must be, and every time I find myself in the latter scenario I think about how happy I am with my Maxx. Capture that in an ad!

I had the first Razr Maxx and the battery life was great. I would get at least the whole day sometimes 2 days out of it. The biggest downfall was only 1GB of ram. I replaced it with a used Galaxy S3 that also gets though an entire day and doesn’t slow down and freeze. Both on Verizon 4G networks.

The Razr Maxx was very thin and still had a 3300 mAh battery. There is no excuse for every phone out there to have less than 3000 anymore. The S4 is even larger and thicker with a 2300 mAh.

I think as others have said, the issues with them are that they haven’t received particularly good reviews because they have a few small flaws – they didn’t score particularly highly against the competition. So while they both have excellent battery life, you probably wouldn’t choose them or any other phone for that matter, for battery life alone. What we need that kind of advantage but in a good all-round phone such as an iPhone 5S, Galaxy S4 or Nexus 5, but battery life is certainly making its way steadily up my must-have specs list.

I agree with the sentiment of wanting what you can’t have, but this is written like an adolescent dreaming about a tricorder from the starship Enterprise.

Real people have to design things. When we do, we confront constraints. Some of these are technical and some economic. Seldom to technically feasible and economically sensible alternatives get overlooked.

Identifying a desired feature is the simplest of the problems in design. It’s the one all the armchair quarterbacks think makes them a great inventor as they navigate the miracle of a handheld GPS/WiFi/4G/64-bit/128GB from the comfortable vantage point of an end user.

News flash…. ideas are a dime a million. Solutions are not. The devil is in the details. Many, many, many stellar brains are trading off features against one another in an attempt to make cheap enough miracles to satisfy a jaded and unappreciative public. Not just at Apple, but at Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, and dozens of other companies.

Better batteries will come. Real problem solvers are working on that and on dropping the power burden presented by the devices (the consumption side of the equation.) Your part in this is to pay for what is most important to you now and trust that that vote is being tallied and mined for where to concentrate efforts on upcoming generations. Checkbook engineering, if you will.

Sure, a revolution in battery technology is due–not just for cell phones, but for everything. And between 3d printing and new wonder materials like graphene, rest easy; higher capacity batteries are around the corner. Also, ways and speeds of charging are improving. With induction charging becoming more common, imagine the possibility of built-in induction pads in bars or tables at Starbucks. On the other hand, maybe the next big thing will be mere atoms-thick photovoltaic cells, built into your clothes, that allow you to power or charge your devices just by standing in the sun, making concerns about battery life irrelevant, even in the case of zombie apocalypse…

Whichever the case, while I’m confident the advances are coming, I certainly don’t consider it to be the top decider when picking a new phone. Even if I neglect to plug my phone in at night, a car charger and an hour commute every morning and evening are more than enough to ensure that running out of juice is a rare, if not nonexistent, occurrence. For me (and judging by the traffic during those commutes, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this), choice of OS, features, performance, price, whether or not it is locked to a crappy network, etc., will continue to be the dominant issues driving my choice.

Did you research outside Android and iOS ? Blackberry Z10 / Z30 gives me about 8 hours on extreme heavy usage including playing a 2 hour movie. For normal usage this gives me about 18 hours. This is on 10.1 BB10 OS on current T-Mobile network. 10.2 increases the battery life I believe for which updates need to roll into US.

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Here’s a thought. Why don’t you actually do a little investigative journalism and discuss the “why” of limited battery battery life? What are the technological limitations that prevent batteries from storing more energy? Or of phones that require large amounts of energy? Or, look up some of the alternatives that are on the horizon (such as https://news.slac.stanford.edu/features/new-nanostructure-batteries-keeps-going-and-going). But, since this is a blog, I guess whining is par for the course.

The Moto X and the iPhone5s are using dual core CPUs, lots of the Android phones are using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Quadcore ARMs

Bigger AMOLED displays and more CPU cores = sucks more juice.

The batteries can be replaced/swapped on many phones. If not having your phone is that big of a deal–get a spare battery. The supplemental powerpacks are an option as well. Hopefully consumers buy the phone that offers the best user experience.

Battery-life is part of that equation for sure, but not the totality of the customer experience.

As a consumer, I would not mind having a better battery life. But whether it’s going to be the next big battle ground is quite questionable. Companies are fast moving to features that give them strategic advantage rather than just tactical. Sure, a battery upgrade would give a certain company a boost for one quarter…then what? The competition would quickly replicate (unless the technology is totally unique!), and then we’d be talking about a new battlefield.

I continue to use a Motorola Droid Bionic with an extended-life battery. Its great advantage is that the battery can be changed in the field, unlike many of the newer smartphone models – I can keep a charged battery on hand and in the unlikely event that the battery becomes severely discharged I can change to a fresh battery. I haven’t experienced any significant disadvantages, since Google and Verizon keep the phone’s software up to date.

I’ve never understood why the world has moved away from field replaceable batteries.

There are two products not mentioned which are gaining global sales. Dog and Bone is now shipping two unique products- 1- Dog and Bone Back Bone- The protective case is built with QI Charging Technology and will charge at 2 AMPs. Much quicker than the 1 Amp Charger supplied with Iphone 5 and 6 Series products. The QI Charging Pad can slide out of case and be replaced with a Dog and Bone Extended battery- 2- Dog and Bone is actually now the global leader in Water Proof cases for Iphone 5 and 6 series product. The product has a great rubberized texture feel and is much easier to use than Life Proof Cases. Dog and Bone has been around for several years and they now have launched product in the US Market. Their global sales have been outstanding. Both Dog and Bone products the QI Charging and The Water Proof case are available in a variety of colors. If you have not tried the I Charging (CHE) I suggest this is something to try. The product is not yet available in many retail outlets yet. Dog and Bone just appointed a large accessory distributor to sell into the Wireless dealer and Retail channels. I love myu QI Charging Pad. I have been using product for a few weeks and I am able to charge my device quickly and the insert is easy to remove and place the extended battery on the case. The Water Proof case I am using is much easiuer fit and much easier to use than many of the other cases on the market.

I really don’t understand why more people are not screaming for phones with replaceable batteries. Took my Samsung Galaxy S5 to Europe with 3 spare batteries, 2 usually got me through my typical 18 hour day of heavy maps, GPS, camera, video, web surfing, and Google Translate. Once I needed three. Once back at my room, put one in the wall charger and did the other while in the phone. I never worried about running out of juice. And, the footprint on a spare battery is 1/5 the overall size of the phone, was real easy to carry 3 spares around. That is how I picked the phone, I won’t look at anything I can’t pop the battery out of quickly/easily.